The Forbidden Universe (14 page)

The irony – which is seldom mentioned by modern historians of science – is that the main pro-Copernicus argument that Galileo puts forward in the
Dialogue
, his old ‘proof’ based on the tides, was wrong. His original title was, in fact,
Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea
. The Inquisition in Florence forced him to change the title, which is odd, as the new one made it more obvious that the book was about the heliocentric debate. Galileo was careful to keep to the rule of discussing Copernicanism without actually advocating it. Nevertheless, the book caused rumblings, especially among the Jesuits, and Urban came under pressure to act.

Despite the myth of the ‘clash of egos’, it is clear that Urban had to be pushed into action. His position as pope was far from secure, as many in Rome thought him too soft on Protestantism – there was even talk of deposing him.
²¹
This was largely because Urban was concerned about the power of the Hapsburg dynasty, which ruled Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, both of which were locked in battle with the Protestant nations. For his own political reasons he had refused to give his sanction to the war or to lend it diplomatic or military support, but it did lead some to wonder where his sympathies really lay. His many opponents among the Cardinal Inquisitors were making much of his endorsement of the
Dialogue
’s publication as another sign of his softness on heresy. He therefore had to
take action to keep his own position secure. This was no clash of egos. Urban was just running scared.

As a result of Jesuit pressure, Urban appointed a commission to investigate whether Galileo had broken his ban of sixteen years earlier. Some historians believe that this was an attempt to keep the Inquisition out of the matter, another sign of the Pope’s reluctance to let the Inquisition loose on his old friend. If so, it was remarkably
unsuccessful
. In September 1632 Urban instructed the Inquisition in Florence to deliver a summons to a shocked Galileo to present himself in Rome to answer questions about his book. He appeared before the Inquisition in April the following year, no doubt with Campanella’s advice to stand firm – because of the
theological
(that is, Hermetic) importance of establishing that the sun was at the centre – ringing in his ears.

Galileo’s defence was that his book had not upheld Copernican theory, but had merely discussed it. He declared that until the decree of 1616 he had regarded neither the Copernican nor Ptolemaic hypothesis as beyond dispute (contradicting his statements to Kepler thirty-six years earlier), but since then he had held the Ptolemaic view ‘to be true and indisputable’.
²²
While few would blame Galileo for reneging on his own opinions and weaselling out of the situation – after all, this was the Inquisition he was facing – these were hardly the words either of a noble defender of intellectual freedom or willing would-be martyr. And yet neither does he seem an arrogant old man who refused to admit he was wrong.

Galileo lost. The inquisitors decided that the
Dialogue
was a disingenuous attempt to promote heliocentricity, which it probably was, and that his attempts to disguise it as a mere discussion were totally unconvincing. He was found ‘
veementemente sospetto d’eresia
’ – vehemently suspect of heresy – just one degree below actually being a heretic. The
only way out was to ‘abjure, curse and detest’ the very ideas that caused the suspicion.

Galileo had to admit his error and renounce his ideas, kneeling before the altar of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the same basilica from which Bruno had set out to his horrendous death thirty-three years earlier. Publication of anything by Galileo – anything he had written or would write in the future – was forbidden (although in the event he did manage to get some works printed in Germany). He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but as he was over seventy years old, was instead committed to house arrest. He stayed first with a supporter, the Archbishop of Siena, where one of his first visitors was none other than Tomasso Campanella …
²³

Later, Galileo was allowed to return to his own villa outside Florence, where he died in 1642. Less than a year before his death he wrote to the Florentine ambassador in Venice that:

Perhaps Galileo had an unusually over-developed sense of irony.

But what of Campanella? In 1634, the year after Galileo’s trial, there was another attempt to organize a revolt in Calabria. Whether Campanella was directly involved is unclear, but the leader was certainly one of his followers. So it was expedient, to say the least, for him to leave Rome for Paris – a well-worn route for fugitive Italian Hermeticists. There he became a favourite of Cardinal Richelieu, who persuaded the king to give him a pension. Encouraged by this, he transferred his hopes to the French
monarchy, urging Richelieu to make Paris into his City of the Sun. His big hope settled on the future Louis XIV, born in 1638, who he expected to rule the world in partnership with a reformed papacy. Campanella was the first person to call the infant Louis the Sun King, as an acknowledgement of his great
Hermetic
potential.
²⁵

After Campanella’s dizzyingly strange and extreme career, which took him from castle dungeons to the favour of some of the greatest figures in Europe, he died in Paris in May 1639. But there can be no doubt that his legacy lived on.

Although during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries researchers perceived a connection between the trials of Bruno and Galileo, the notion of Bruno’s fate being a more severe foreshadowing of Galileo’s persecution, dying for his Copernican beliefs, is not borne out by the facts. There was indeed a connection between the two, but it is the other way round. Action was taken against Galileo because of the Hermetic – the Brunian – implications of his views.

Yet while not often recognized, the connection between the two trials is hugely significant. Although Galileo’s trial is always cited as
the
moment when forces of reason and dogma collided head-on, the Hermetic factor is arguably the most important. It was, after all, the reverence that heliocentricity was accorded by Hermeticists in general and Bruno’s followers in particular that was the major reason the Church sought to damn heliocentricity, and therefore Galileo himself.

Neither side could admit what Galileo’s trial was really about. While being aware of the Hermetic implications of the
Dialogue
, Galileo never made them overt, which meant that the Church couldn’t use that against him. It is unlikely
it would have wanted to draw attention to the importance of heliocentricity for the Hermetic revolution in any case. The Hermetic factor was therefore present, however, but simply relegated to the background – which is why there is a distinct sense of something missing in the conventional story of the trial.

Given the uncompromising Bruno and the revolutionary Campanella, the Inquisition and the Jesuits would have undoubtedly been only too fearful of the threat posed by Hermeticism. They would have traced the same connections we have outlined – beginning with Copernicus’ references to Hermes Trismegistus, through Bruno’s reforming career and the hidden presence of the Giordanisti, to Galileo’s links with Pinelli and, most damningly, Campanella. They may even have seen the connection between Galileo’s
Dialogue
and Bruno’s
The Ash Wednesday Supper
. Even if they were putting two and two together and coming up with five – a not uncommon occurrence with the Inquisition – these connections would still have shaped their fears and consequently their actions.

It seems, however, Galileo was by no means as innocent as he tried to appear. There are valid questions, for example, about his relationship to the secret Hermetic reform movement. There is his continued association and
correspondence
with Campanella to take into consideration, especially his wish to see him in the wake of his warning-off in 1616. What would Galileo get out of such an association? Campanella was a religious, esoteric and political theorist – not a mathematician or scientist. For an ambitious man like Galileo, conscious of his image, Campanella was hardly the kind of company he should have wanted to keep.

And then there is Galileo’s apparent use of Bruno’s
The Ash Wednesday Supper
– which contains the first mention of the concept of the Copernican sun as the trigger for a new Hermetic age – as a model for his
Dialogue Concerning the
Two Chief World Systems
. Was this merely a belated, and necessarily covert, acknowledgement of Galileo’s
intellectual
debt to Bruno, rectifying the failure for which Kepler had criticized him? Or was it a covert signal to the Giordanisti that he was a sympathizer – perhaps even one of them? It is safe to say that at the very least Bruno’s work influenced Galileo’s, which yet again places Hermeticism at the centre of the scientific revolution. 

The Hermetic cause suffered several major setbacks in the early years of the seventeenth century, and for a time it must have seemed as if its hopes for a new golden age had been dashed once and for all. The first setback was, of course, the grisly execution of audacious prime mover Giordano Bruno in 1600, but the second came fourteen years later and was to provide even more ammunition for those opposing the Hermetic movement.

When the
Corpus Hermeticum
was rediscovered in the mid-fifteenth century everybody – whether they supported or opposed Hermeticism – accepted that the texts dated from the most ancient days of the Egyptian civilization. But suddenly a learned work exploded onto the scene that made the startling claim that the texts were of a much later provenance, not being written until the second or third century CE. The bombshell was
Of Things Holy and Ecclesiastical
(
De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis
), by one Isaac Casaubon. Born to refugee Huguenot parents in Geneva in 1559, he was widely regarded as the most learned man in Europe, his speciality being classical languages. After a glittering academic career in Switzerland and France he found himself working at the royal library in Paris under the patronage of Henri IV, the great hope of the Hermetic reformers. In May 1610 Henri, like his predecessor, was
assassinated by a Catholic fanatic. This prompted a lurch towards ultra-orthodox Catholicism in France, which made life decidedly uncomfortable for Protestants such as Casaubon, who was more than happy to accept an invitation from James I to move to England.